Apple and the war of words, hearts and minds

xkcd have said it. Stephen Fry has said. I'm sure some other people have said it. And yet, for reasons I've yet to fully understand, most geeks continue not to say it - it being that, in all honesty, most tech rivalries are more than a little silly.

Now you might say "Ah, but Diarmuid, isn't that the case in all walks of life? Aren't all rivalries a little silly and petty?". Well, the answer is a multi-faceted and most un-satisfactory yes but no.

Manchester United and Liverpool supporters have been known to get a little boisterous, and in a way this is very understandable. Both teams compete in the same competition and both wish to succeed at the expense of the others. For the fans, there is the excitement of going to watch their team on matchday, and sharing a little in the victories and losses. Do Apple fans really get the same satisfaction when the line up outside an Apple store for the latest toy?

And what of Microsoft supporters? They don't even get the pleasure of congregating in a line with like-minded folk (at least, I've never seen a line form to get a hold of the latest version of Windows or MS Office). So what is it with Apple people who simply don't get why people choose windows? Or (possibly even worse) Microsoft supporters who don't get why Apple users are thus?

What I don't get is the bitter war of words. xkcd had an excellent cartoon in the same vain about the Firefox v IE struggle - "sometimes I wake up and realise 'hey, it's just a browser'", or words to that effect.

So here's what I want you to take from this - sure Apple may have run a million miles from their 1984 "no evil" image (much like Google, but that's a whole other can...) but they still do things that no other company can do. They still produce beautiful kit that makes you go "oooh..." in a way that most PC manufacturers just can't manage. They also, in case you hadn't noticed, make one of the most desirable phones on the planet, whether you can look past its deficiencies or not.

And then there's the PC, which has so much compatibility and so many programmes available for it that I'm willing to bet nobody has even the faintest idea what the total number is. 

No matter which you like best, there's a reason to go with the other one. So why the war of words? Sometimes humanity worries me.